Bloom Energy Corporation at a Glance

Uppers

Downers

Relatively new company, job stability is in question

Behind schedule on its ambitious early business plan

Expects long days, and work on the occasional weekends

The Bottom Line

Bloom offers an exciting opportunity for engineers looking to work on a fuel source that doesn't rely on disappearing fossil fuels. The pay and benefits here are solid, too. Unfortunately, because Bloom is a relative newcomer to the energy field, it carries the same risks as all start-ups: jobs here are not necessarily stable ones.

About Bloom Energy Corporation

Making clean-burning generators is a blossoming business for Bloom Energy. The company invented the first power generator that uses solid-oxide fuel cells, which convert natural gas or renewable fuels such as biogas into electricity without any pollution-causing combustion. The Bloom Energy Server, known as the Bloom Box, contains ceramic wafers made of a "sand-like powder" instead of more expensive materials like acid or molten carbonate. Each Bloom Box is the size of a parking spot, weighs about 20,000 pounds, and costs $800,000. The servers provide 200kW of power, enough for a 30,000-sq.-ft. office building. It produces power for such major customers as AT&T, CalTech, eBay, Verizon, and Wal-Mart.

Sales and Marketing

When the Bloom Box was launched (in 2010), customers received a 30% tax credit from the federal government, and California companies received an additional $2,500-per-kW state subsidy, which dropped the price to $310,000 for one box. Without any incentives, Bloom Boxes are substantially more expensive than using electricity supplied from the traditional power grid.

Strategy

The first Bloom Boxes were used as backup generators in lieu of the traditional diesel-burning backup generators. Ideally, the company aims to market a smaller generator to residential customers for about $3,000, but that technology could take as long as 10 years to develop. The current-size Bloom Boxes can power about 150 homes, but no municipal customers have signed on yet.

That year Bloom Energy signed a deal with Verizon to install Bloom Energy fuel cell systems at three of its California-based locations: two call-switching centers in Los Angeles and San Francisco and a data center in San Jose. Verizon plans to invest $100 million in a solar and fuel-cell energy project that will help power 19 of the company’s facilities in Arizona, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and North Carolina.

To add more clients to its customer base, in 2012 Bloom Energy announced plans to go bi-coastal through the opening of a manufacturing facility in Delaware. The plant's construction is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2013.

Company Background

Bloom Energy didn't invent solid-oxide fuel cells -- the technology traces its roots back to the 1930s from research by two Swiss scientists. Siemens Energy and the DOE have been major researchers and developers of solid-oxide fuel-cell technology over the years.

Bloom Energy came about in 2001, when KR Sridhar, a NASA scientist, set up shop at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley to develop a marketable product. Initially called Ion America, the company secured funding from Kleiner Perkins and spent about $400 million to develop the Bloom Box.